‘This Was a Tour de Force by Joe Biden’: President Feels the Love After SOTU
Campaign-style address wins high marks
President Biden is winning suffusive praise following a fiery State of the Union address which rang more like a campaign stemwinder than policy speech.
Biden is seeing high marks after his annual address Tuesday evening, in which he took Republicans, the persistent age issue and his likely opponent this November head-on.
Speaking for 68 minutes to a joint session of Congress and the nation, to what will be his largest audience ahead of this summer’s quadrennial political conventions, Biden never once spoke Donald Trump’s name. Rather he referred to his rival as “my predecessor,” 13 times to draw a series of stark contrasts between the two choices voters likely will have come November.
It was a performance which has been winning rave reviews.
“Part of this is delivery, part of it is speechwriting, part of it is setting up the argument for the fall,” former Republican congressman from Florida and current MSNBC host Joe Scarborough said Wednesday morning. “I’ve sat through a lot of these, and I have never seen one side put in so many uncomfortable positions as the Republicans were last night because they were on the wrong side of history, they were on the wrong side of the polls, they were on the wrong side of politics, they were on the wrong side of decency. This was a tour de force by Joe Biden.”
Others were equally effusive in their praise.
“I’ve been working in politics for 30 years. I have never had a night last night, where my phone was just exploding with people who yesterday were saying, ‘Biden campaign? What campaign? There is no campaign,’ saying, ‘Oh, my god, he knocked it out of the park,’” said Jen Palmieri, a political analyst who worked on Democrat Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Biden really dispelled worries about his age as president, according to Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson.
“I thought he just completely blew away the ‘Biden is too old’ issue last night,” he said. “I think — to the extent that this issue that has been talked about and hands have been wrung until they’re raw over, to the extent that that can be totally dissipated in one night — I think it happened last night because there was no question that he was vigorous and on top of every issue and able to continue performing the job of president.”
Even Biden’s fellow elected Democrats heaped praise.
Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler, of New York, even joked with the president about being called “cognitively impaired” following Biden’s fiery speech.
The pair spoke on the floor of the House chamber after the address, alongside other Democrats.
“Nobody’s going to talk about ‘cognitively impaired’ now,” Nadler said to Biden.
Biden laughed and responded, “I kind of wish at times there were cognitive impairment.”
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